PROFILE / Adam Bock / Writer's 'Flights' of fancy take off / No down time for prolific playwright

Steven Winn, Chronicle Theater Critic

Published 4:00 am, Wednesday, January 30, 2002

Photo: John Storey

Image 1of/1

Caption

Close

Image 1 of 1

BOCK30-C-25JAN02-DD-JRS-Playwright Adam Bock on Guerrero Street in San Francisco. Chronicle Photo by John Storey.

BOCK30-C-25JAN02-DD-JRS-Playwright Adam Bock on Guerrero Street in San Francisco. Chronicle Photo by John Storey.

Photo: John Storey

PROFILE / Adam Bock / Writer's 'Flights' of fancy take off / No down time for prolific playwright

1 / 1

Back to Gallery

One piece of it started four years ago in Sylvia Plath's old room at the Yaddo writers' colony, which had a picture of an aviary on the wall. Another came from his background as a medieval history major.

"I also knew I wanted to write a play about air," said San Francisco writer Adam Bock the other day, "something about birds and wind and flight." Then there was this bit about an ice hockey player who couldn't tell another man he loved him and one about a woman starting her own church.

The origins of Bock's new play, "Five Flights," may sound impossibly jumbled. The result, an aerodynamically tight comedy about love and grief, playing at the Thick House on Potrero Hill, is the sweetest theatrical discovery of the season. Splendidly acted, designed and staged (by Kent Nicholson), this Encore Theatre Company world premiere pulls together its various strands -- along with glosses on Russian ballet and a made-up religion -- into a graceful 85-minute piece about a brother and sister (Liam Vincent and Lisa Steindler) trying to thaw emotionally after the death of their parents.

"Five Flights" is laugh-out-loud funny, in surprising, quirky ways. In one mostly wordless scene, two hockey players (Craig Neibaur and Kevin Karrick) turn a postgame shower into a comic faceoff of aggression and mutual respect. The number five gets a bizarrely fervent spin from a bird-obsessed street preacher (Alexis Lezin).

Blue Ivy Had an All-Out Bidding War With Tyler Perry at AuctionWibbitz

Iggy Azalea Opens Up About Burning al of Nick Young's ClothesWibbitz

But the play's humor, as Nicholson says, is never pursued as an end in itself. "There's always an emotional moment that actually leads you somewhere. The play registers those miracles and coincidences in life we pass by without noticing all the time."

In person, Bock projects an almost rabbity alertness and enthusiasm that make everything seem sharper and quicker around him. Nicholson talks by phone with the playwright "three or four times a week, and all we do is laugh."

Bordered by short black hair and a close-cropped beard, Bock's dark eyes and ready grin glow as if lit from within.

"If I knew you better," he says, moments into a conversation at his neighborhood cafe on Guerrero Street, "I'd probably be totally slumped down and relaxed." Melting back in his chair for a moment, he seems just as attuned to the syntax of body language as he is to the fluttering, stop-and-go cadences of his characters' speech.

Relaxation may be the one term outside his lexicon. Since his local playwriting debut with "Swimming in the Shallows," produced by Berkeley's Shotgun Players in 1999, Bock has been a virtual writing machine.

Two new scripts, "The Typographer's Dream" (drawn in part from his 2 1/2- year stint at a graphic and Web design firm) and "The Fairy's Tale," are forthcoming at Shotgun. Another, "A Little Little Small Brown Bird," is slated for a reading at the Magic Theatre. He and Nicholson plan to collaborate on a dance-theater piece (with San Francisco Ballet and "Five Flights" choreographer Julia Adam). A London production of "Swimming," a man-meets- shark love story, is in the works.

"I'm a little overwhelmed," grants Bock, who has also found time to teach at San Jose State and the new Berkeley Rep School of Theatre, hold down assorted day jobs, tool around town on his motorcycle and work out at the gym. "I feel lucky but nervous. I just hope I'm up to the work."

Bock, 40, was born and raised in Montreal, which has left the familiar Canadian watermarks on his speech. Nicholson is "a great dramaturge, eh?" Plays are "aboot" one thing or another. A businessman father and environmentalist mother were both very supportive of Bock's theatrical leanings, which surfaced early on. A "site-specific" adaptation of "Harriet the Spy" was one schoolboy production.

Bock attended prep school and college (Bowdoin) in New England and later studied playwriting with Paula Vogel at Brown. But being a Canadian, he believes, left a lasting imprint on his sensibility. As both gay and white, and an English speaker in French-dominated Montreal, "I was a minority and not a minority," he says. An "outsider-insider" humor comes naturally.

Bock kept acting and became something of a gay theater celebrity in Rhode Island, when his annual "Gay Boy Nutcracker" acquired cult status. He quit acting, quit theater altogether in what he calls "a crisis of faith," in 1990. He was playing a suicidal skinhead in a friend's play, and a decision to censor the work for young audiences left him wondering "who or what I'm doing theater for."

Bock's has a "short answer" for why he moved to San Francisco five years ago: "The guys." He hastens to add that he's currently unattached. "Be sure to put that in the paper, eh?"

A list of theatrical influences includes Beckett, Brecht, Chekhov and Spike Jones. "Bugs Bunny," he says soberly, "feels very high art." He also gives high marks to TV's "Everybody Loves Raymond."

Bock's characters -- the lesbians and hockey players, preachers and sharks - - are all "parts of Adam," says Nicholson. "He's not afraid to put himself onstage. You might not realize that unless you know him really well."

Bock cheerfully concurs -- "They're all a little bit of me" -- but adds a cryptic paradox. "Of course I embellish. And then they're not me as a result."